ROLE OF VOLUNTARY PROGRAMS IN AGRICULTURAL NONPOINT POLLUTION POLICY

Voluntary programs' effectiveness in reducing agricultural pollution is under debate in the professional literature, within government regulatory agencies, and among legislators. In general, non-farm business owners bear little or none of the costs of environmental degradation that their business activities cause. However, farmers who reside on the farm may bear some of the costs associated with using chemicals. As a result, voluntary programs encouraging adoption of management practices that simultaneously improve on farm and off-farm environmental quality may not require subsidizing farmers for their full loss in profits. However, farmers likely will not adopt regulatory agencies' recommended management practices that do not positively affect on farm environmental quality unless subsidies exceed full adoption costs .     

THE CORRELATION OF YOUTH PHYSICAL ACTIVITY WITH STATE POLICIES

Childhood overweight has risen dramatically in the United States during the past three decades. The search for policy solutions is limited by a lack of evidence regarding the effectiveness of state policies for increasing physical activity among youths. This paper estimates the correlation of student physical activity with a variety of state policies. We study nationwide data on high school students from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System for 1999, 2001, and 2003 merged with data on state policies from several sources. We control for a variety of characteristics of states and students to mitigate bias due to the endogenous selection of policies, but we conservatively interpret our results as correlations, not causal impacts. Two policies are positively correlated with participation in physical education (PE) class for both boys and girls: a binding PE unit requirement and a state PE curriculum. We also find that state spending on parks and recreation is positively correlated with two measures of girls' overall physical activity. ( JEL I18, I28)     

BENEFITS AND COSTS OF INTENSIVE FOSTER CARE SERVICES: THE CASEY FAMILY PROGRAMS COMPARED TO STATE SERVICES

The foster care system attempts to prepare children and youth who have suffered child maltreatment for successful adult lives. This study documents the economic advantages of a privately funded foster care program that provided longer term, more intensive, and more expensive services compared to public programs. The study found significant differences in major adult educational, health, and social outcomes between children placed in the private program and those placed in public programs operated by Oregon and Washington. For the outcomes for which we could find financial data, the estimated present value of the enhanced foster care services exceeded their extra costs. Generalizing to the roughly 100,000 adolescents age 12-17 entering foster care each year, if all of them were to receive the private model of services, the savings for a single cohort of these children could be about $6.3 billion in 2007 dollars. ( JEL D61, H75)     

PREFERENCES FOR STATE TAX AND SPENDING POLICIES: EVIDENCE FROM SURVEY DATA ON THE ROLE OF INCOME

Employing a commonly-used method of creating a continuous income variable from categorical data, we obtain results from a fiscal survey that reveal a strong nonmonotonic effect of income on the willingness to pay additional taxes for state expenditures on education and public aid. The existence of income-demand schedules that are U- or inverted U-shaped casts doubt on the appropriateness of assuming that the median income voter is decisive. After investigating the sensitivity of our results to different income measures, we suggest that fiscal surveys should be designed to provide sufficiently detailed information about respondents'incomes, especially for high-income respondents.     

人民币升值及我国的应对措施

人民币升值已经是我国无法回避的问题。总体来看,在现阶段对于我国宏观经济均衡目标而言,人民币升值比不升值对我国经济更有利。但人民币升值的速度取决于我国企业对人民币升值的承受能力、我国扩大内需的能力、我国政府掌控人民币汇率的能力以及热钱流入的速度和资产价格泡沫的大小等。其中,扩大内需是最根本的决定因素。本文提出了在短期内扩大内需以应对人民币升值的两个主要措施,即放松计划生育政策和进行大规模生态开发。     

POLLUTION PREVENTION AS PUBLIC POLICY: AN ASSESSMENT

In recent years, both the public and private sectors have become increasingly interested in pollution prevention—avoiding creation of pollution—as an alternative to treatment or disposal. Observers cite a number of advantages for this approach, such as eliminating the problem of switching pollution from one medium to another and reducing environmental problems by avoiding pollutants in the first place. This paper assesses the advantages of pollution prevention and contrasts them with a performance standard that restricts pollution but gives businesses maximum discretion in how to meet the restriction. In most situations, a performance standard can be less costly and equally effective. However, pollution prevention may be more desirable in the case of nonpoint source pollution or when a pollutant affects a number of media .     

上市公司管理层持股的激励效用及影响因素

持股权合约是协调管理层与股东利益的关键治理机制。中国上市公司高级管理人员的持股比例偏低,起不到应有的激励效果,上市公司在制定管理层持股权合约的数量时并没有考虑到依据经济学原理对最优合约数量做出规定。应依据现代科学(经济学、行为学与管理学等)的原理,结合各企业自身实际情况制定最优的持股权合约。     

BANK EFFICIENCY AND THE EFFECTIVENESS OF MONETARY POLICY

Advances in information technology and bank consolidation have altered the way banks operate by necessitating that banks control costs and provide services efficiently to remain competitive. Given the unique role bank operations play in the transmission of monetary policy, a key unresolved question is whether bank efficiency alters monetary policy outcomes. Using a stochastic frontier approach to measure cost‐efficiency and panel data of U.S. bank balance sheets, we show that banks with greater cost‐efficiency are more sensitive to monetary shocks. (JEL E52, E44, E51)     

上市公司的财务政策与绩效

本文通过理论和实证分析发现,上市公司的财务政策对绩效有影响作用。派息率作为反映经营者对投资者利益重视程度的指标,对生产效率与资本效益均具有显著性正面效应;长期投资比率作为反映经营者对企业成长偏好程度的指标,对生产效率与资本效益均具有显著性负面效应;而负债比率作为本应反映来自投资者事后惩治力度的指标,对资本效益却具有显著性负面效应。此外,属于竞争性行业的企业的生产效率不低于受保护行业的企业,但其资本效益劣于后者。     

THE LORENZ ORDER AND THE EFFECTS OF TAXATION POLICIES

To any finite population of n individuals with associated incomes x ₁…, x _n we can associate a Lorenz curve. By associating this population with a random variable X representing the income of a randomly chosen individual of the population, the concept of a Lorenz curve and the associated partial order (the Lorenz Order) based on nested Lorenz curves is readily extended to be defined in the class of all non-negative integrable random variables. In this context well known results on inequality attenuating and inequality rank preserving taxation policies are found to admit simple more general proofs. Some results on the effects of random taxation are also reviewed. The effects of applying different taxation policies within subpopulations lead one to consider questions regarding inequality attenuation results in mixture settings. It is observed that, more generally, inequality comparisons can be unambiguously made between any non-negative variables even if measured in dissimilar units.     

宏观经济走势与宏观调控政策基本取向

当前经济形势呈现良好的发展态势,但下一步的宏观经济走势依然有一定的不确定性,经济上行和下行的两种趋向同时并存,反映出未来通货膨胀压力与通货紧缩影响依然存在,宏观调控仍处于关键时刻。要把握好2006年宏观调控四大主要预期目标,宏观经济政策应以"稳"为主,适时适度采取微调措施。继续实施稳健的财政货币政策,加强各项宏观经济政策的协调配合,重视发挥价格、税收、汇率等杠杆作用,促进经济平稳较快增长。     

中国和印度的农村工业化比较研究

在过去几十年里,中国农村的非农经济取得了举世瞩目的高速增长,对中国经济的整体增长做出了积极贡献。而在印度,该部门的表现却大为逊色,无论产出还是就业都增长缓慢。本文从两国制度性及政策差异(特别是在政治制度、所有权结构、信贷制度)来分析两国农村非农业部门出现不同的发展模式的原因。通过中印两国农村非农业经济的优劣势的回顾,我们可以更清楚地看到该部门增长的潜力与挑战。     

THE DISTRIBUTIONAL EFFECTS OF COVID-19 AND OPTIMAL MITIGATION POLICIES

This article develops a quantitative heterogeneous agent–life cycle–epidemiological model that is used to study the aggregate and distributional consequences of COVID-19 and mitigation policies. First, a stay-at-home subsidy is preferred to a lockdown because it reduces deaths by more and output by less. Second, Pareto-improving policies can reduce deaths by nearly 45% without any reduction in output relative to no public mitigation. Finally, it is possible to simultaneously improve public health and economic outcomes, suggesting that debates regarding a trade-off between economic and health objectives may be misguided.     

EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT POLICIES ON URBAN AND RURAL INCOME INEQUALITY

We use three conventional inequality indices—the Gini, the coefficient of variation of income, and the relative mean deviation of income—and the Atkinson index to examine the effect of income tax rates, the minimum wage, and all the major government welfare and transfer programs on the evolution of income inequality for rural and urban areas by state from 1981 to 1997. We find that these programs have qualitatively similar but quantitatively different effects on urban and rural areas. Most importantly, taxes are more effective in redistributing income in urban than in rural areas, while welfare and other government transfer programs play a larger role in rural areas.     

关于当前宏观经济形势和宏观经济政策

2002年下半年的经济增长不会像2001年那样呈逐季下降趋势,可能出现比较平稳的上升。但我们要清醒地认识到,通货紧缩的趋势扩大和有效需求不足问题基本上还没有得到解决,经济增长的内在动力依然不足。在继续坚持积极的财政政策和稳健的货币政策的同时,应研究选择积极的财政政策淡出的时间和力度,不能把积极的财政政策中期化和长期化。     

POLLUTION AND POLLUTION ABATEMENT IN THE NATIONAL ACCOUNTS

Building on the approach of Weitzman, as extended by Hartwick and Mäler, five models of national accounts in a dynamic competitive economy with pollution externalities are constructed: flow pollutants, stock pollutants, fossil fuels and CO₂, living resources and acid rain, and household defensive expenditures. The results measure welfare rather than national product per se . The general conclusions are that abatement expenditures should be treated as intermediate consumption, that adjustments need to be made for both pollution emissions and natural pollution dissipation processes, that marginal social costs should be used to value emissions, and that the level of environmental services must be valued in measuring welfare. Not only should household defensive expenditures not be subtracted from the welfare measure, under plausible assumptions the adjustment to welfare (as opposed to NNP) includes a value greater than the level of household defensive expenditure.     

“两型社会”建设中的土地需求调控政策研究

以武汉城市圈和长株潭城市群两型社会建设综合配套改革试验区作为研究对象,运用文献综合和实证研究的方法,分析了影响土地需求的各种因素,在此基础上提出有针对性的土地需求调控政策。研究表明:在土地供给总量一定的情况下,适当提高用地成本,使土地集约利用成为用地者的理性选择,进而实现土地节约利用,减少土地利用对环境的负面影响,是"两型社会"建设目标下土地资源管理的核心任务。土地需求调控的具体政策手段有:①地价政策,即普遍实行土地出让最低限价政策,进一步扩大土地"招拍挂"出让范围;②税收政策,包括适当提高耕地占用税、城镇土地使用税税率,开征土地闲置税和土地财产税,强化土地增值税的征管;③信贷政策,即通过金融信贷机构严格对房地产开发商进行信用等级和贷款条件审查,限制信贷额度,降低土地开发投资的信贷风险。同时要从控制人口数量、严格限制人均用地标准,实行行业准入制度,强化对划拨用地的利用管理,严格贯彻土地管理法律政策等方面完善土地需求调控的配套措施。